Users will be able to watch music videos from Vevo, which hosts music videos from major record labels, and listen to clips from SoundCloud, a website where users can upload and share their audio recordings. The app is likely to open separately from Twitter.

Ryan Seacrest, an American TV presenter, tweeted that he was “playing with @twitter’s new music app (yes it’s real!)”. The official Twitter Music account retweeted him, apparently confirming its existence.

The Coachella Festival, one of the biggest music festivals of the year, begins this weekend in Twitter's home state of California. The xx, the Stone Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are in this year's line up.

Twitter confirmed it had bought We Are Hunted today, a start-up that tracked the most popular songs that people were discussing on the social network. We Are Hunted said its developers would “continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team” but declined to go into any more detail in a statement on its website.

Twitter has created a new page, music.twitter.com, with the company’s logo and #music displayed in the centre. It is not yet active.

In January Twitter acquired Vine, a service where users can upload six second video clips to the social network.